A politician widely accused of running death squads might not be expected to have an easy time running for public office.

But this is Iraq. In a nation sadly inured to years of sectarian bloodletting, Hakim al-Zamili not only has a place on a prominent Shiite election slate, but stands poised to win a place in the Parliament, as early voting began Thursday morning for the infirm, people with special needs and members of the military and the police.

It is an astonishing turnabout that shows the limits of political reconciliation. While some Sunni candidates have been barred from running in the election for their alleged support of the Baath Party, Mr. Zamili’s candidacy has provoked nary a protest from the nation’s leading Shiite politicians. That runs the risk that Shiite leaders will be seen as taking steps against only those who persecuted Shiites, not Sunnis.

Mr. Zamili’s new political role has heightened concerns that for all the talk of cross-sectarian alliances among some Shiite and Sunni factions, Iraq may be unable to firmly break with its troubled past.

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With U.S. forces scheduled to begin withdrawal from Iraq this summer, Iraq must now take the lead in rebuilding itself. Iraqi scientists and engineers will hold the key to the future, and Iraqi women hope to be a part of that. Liane Hansen speaks to Dr. Alkazragy and Dr. Mustafa, two female Iraqi scientists who are visiting scholars at American universities. The doctors have asked that their first names be withheld for security concerns.

Listen to it all (just over 8 minutes).

[Leslie] Kammerdiener is among thousands of unpaid caregivers ”” parents, spouses, siblings and war buddies ”” helping veterans injured in the Iraq and Afghanistan wars get through each day, says Barbara Cohoon, deputy director of government relations for the non-profit National Military Family Association. She says the caregivers are a vulnerable group, often under-recognized, and in need of help to navigate the military’s medical system. Cohoon says not all caregivers receive military benefits, even though many have quit jobs, moved out of their homes and drained their savings to care for their loved ones.

“Nobody’s got a handle on numbers, but 7,500 is the number bandied about,” says Cohoon, whose organization provides counseling and helps families negotiate the health system.

The range of injuries caregivers attend to spans from gashes and fractures that will heal, to comas, amputations, burns, paralysis, nerve damage and brain injuries so severe that cognitive function lingers at the toddler level or below.

Read it all and watch the video of Bob Woodruff and his wife Lee also.

Conscience is the last court of appeal. “If I am utterly convinced, how else could I act? Morally speaking it would be wrong to do anything else. My judgement may be faulty but my moral sense cannot be queried.” As a society we don’t just accept conscience, we expect it. We reject its opposite, the Nuremberg defence of “I only did what I was ordered to do”.

But we do place limits on conscience. Some Muslim student doctors are now telling their medical ethics lecturers that the right of conscience should extend to them, as Muslim men, refusing to examine the bodies of women. They have been given short shrift, but it is problematic, in logic, to say why conscience may be exercised over abortion but not over gender. (Or in the case of Catholic adoption agencies, over sexuality). In the end the answer is empirical rather than logical: that is what this society has decided.

That raises the question of what a society wants in a leader. “My duty was to put the country first,” said Mr Blair at Trimdon. We like that when his view of the national interest concurs with ours. But what about when it does not? When George Bush declared that he was not signing Kyoto because climate change curbs were not in America’s best interest, most outsiders bridled, yet Bush was doing what he saw as a leader’s job. Rowan Williams does the same when he suppresses his personal views on homosexuality in favour of a strategy to try to keep the Anglican Communion together; he sees that his role supersedes, at present, his personal views.

But Tony Blair offers a different view. “My duty was to put the country first,” he said at Trimdon, and “in time you realise that putting the country first doesn’t mean doing the right thing according to the prevailing consensus or the latest snapshot of opinion. It means doing what you genuinely believe to be right. That your duty as prime minister is to act according to your conviction.”

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Britain’s Queen Elizabeth has paid tribute to the country’s armed forces in her traditional Christmas Day message.

The queen who is the symbolic head of the U.K. military spoke of the soldiers killed in Afghanistan.

More than 100 British soldiers have died this year in Afghanistan and 243 have been killed since operations began in October 2001.

As many troops spend this Christmas Day away from loved ones, the Bishop of the British Armed Forces, Richard Moth spoke to us about the importance of God for soldiers serving on the front line.

Listen to it all (just over 1 1/2 minutes).

As a priest led prayers for a few dozen worshipers inside St. Joseph Chaldean Church here on Sunday, Iraqi police officers stood guard outside. They blocked the street to traffic and frisked those who entered for explosive belts.

At churches in Baghdad this week, Christians are being asked for identification to determine if they have names that security force members recognize as Christian. Some churches around the northern city of Mosul are digging in, surrounding their buildings with giant earthen berms to prevent car bombers from getting too close.

For Christians in Iraq, this will be a year of canceled holiday celebrations and of Christmas Masses spent under the protective watch of police officers and soldiers because of a spate of threats by extremist groups to bomb churches on Christmas Day.

“I’m very sad that we are not able to have our rituals for Christmas this year and not have a sermon, but we do not want any Christians to be harmed,” said Edward Poles, a Christian priest at Sa’a Church in Mosul, which was bombed last week, though no one was killed.

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Cold war liberalism had a fine run in the middle third of the 20th century, and it has lingered here and there since. Scoop Jackson kept the flame alive in the 1970s. Peter Beinart wrote a book called “The Good Fight,” giving the tendency modern content.

But after Vietnam, most liberals moved on. It became unfashionable to talk about evil. Some liberals came to believe in the inherent goodness of man and the limitless possibilities of negotiation. Some blamed conflicts on weapons systems and pursued arms control. Some based their foreign-policy thinking on being against whatever George W. Bush was for. If Bush was an idealistic nation-builder, they became Nixonian realists.

Barack Obama never bought into these shifts. In the past few weeks, he has revived the Christian realism that undergirded cold war liberal thinking and tried to apply it to a different world.

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These pictures are just terrific.

Two families of Marines who died are here. Steve Posey is among them. He’s wearing a button with a photo of his son, Lance Cpl. Gregory Posey, of Knoxville, Tenn., who was 22 years old when he died in July. His dad remembers him as a lovable prankster.

“He would loan out anything, sometimes even if it didn’t belong to him,” Posey says. “He had a good heart.”

Posey’s son loved being a Marine. That’s why the family is here.

“We had planned on being here. We’re sticking to our plan,” he says, fighting back tears. “These guys meant a lot to us, so we’re here for them.”

Touching and inspiring. Take the time to listen to it all (a little over 5 minutes).

The man in charge of the inquiry examining events surrounding the Iraq war has said his committee will not produce a report that is a “whitewash”.

Sir John Chilcot, a retired career civil servant, has promised to produce a “full and insightful” account.

Evidence from senior government figures will start on Tuesday and politicians, including former Prime Minister Tony Blair will be called early in 2010.

The report will not be released until after the General Election.

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“I hate having to use disabled parking,” she said. “I see how people look at me, and I know what they’re thinking. ‘What makes that weirdo think she can park there?’ Sometimes they ask me what I’m doing parked in one of those spaces.”

“What do you tell them?” I asked.

“I just walk away,” she said.

“Why don’t you tell them the truth?” I asked. “Why don’t you look them in the eye and say, ‘I’ve had to park in handicapped spaces since I got back from Iraq, because now I can’t walk past a row of cars without thinking that one of them is going to blow up in my face.”

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Last week, Shinseki spoke to a group of young veterans attending college. A former Army chief of staff who was wounded during his service in Vietnam, Shinseki asked the veterans if any of them suffered from post-traumatic stress.

He got only silence ”” so Shinseki asked about symptoms.

“How many of you have a little trouble sleeping at night?” he asked the students, many of whom had been in combat.

The general then asked them if they were overly vigilant for threats in their own homes, or if any of them had been having anger management problems.

“And then hands go up,” Shinseki said. “And they looked at each other, and they suddenly realize they’re not the only ones in it.”

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Never before has this country seen so many women paralyzed by the psychological scars of combat. As of June 2008, 19,084 female veterans of Iraq or Afghanistan had received diagnoses of mental disorders from the Department of Veterans Affairs, including 8,454 women with a diagnosis of post-traumatic stress ”” and this number does not include troops still enlisted, or those who have never used the V.A. system.

Their mental anguish, from mortar attacks, the deaths of friends, or traumas that are harder to categorize, is a result of a historic shift. In Iraq and Afghanistan, the military has quietly sidestepped regulations that bar women from jobs in ground combat. With commanders needing resources in wars without front lines, women have found themselves fighting on dusty roads and darkened outposts in ways that were never imagined by their parents or publicly authorized by Congress. And they have distinguished themselves in the field.

Psychologically, it seems, they are emerging as equals. Officials with the Department of Defense said that initial studies of male and female veterans with similar time outside the relative security of bases in Iraq showed that mental health issues arose in roughly the same proportion for members of each sex, though research continues.

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Surrounded by glass and steel government buildings, some of them bombed-out shells from long ago, St. George’s Church in downtown Baghdad has always seemed like something of an oasis.

Ever since the United States started using high explosives diplomacy with Iraq, the little Anglican church has had one close call after another.

Built in 1936 by the British military during their occupation of Iraq, the church lost some of its famous stained-glass windows when the United States military bombed a nearby building in 1992, and more were destroyed during the invasion in 2003, leaving only three examples remaining. They were mementos of British regiments stationed there.

Sunday the last three stained glass windows were blown out by the suicide bomb blasts that destroyed three Iraqi government buildings nearby, according to the church’s lay pastor, Faiz Georges.

Read it all (the pictures are wonderful).

Speaking at LaGrange College about his varied experiences in Iraq, White recalled the day his Iraqi doctor suggested stem cell treatment and said it could start the next day. White said there are 63 Iraqis with MS who also are receiving the treatment.

“All of us have improved greatly,” he said.

The Anglican clergyman talked about the danger for Christians — and everyone else — in Baghdad. “Everyone in Iraq is faring badly. Everyone is having it difficult,” he said.

“Christians do have it hard,” White said. He said 93 members of his church were killed last year. During the last year, he baptized 13 people — 11 of whom have been killed.

I have thought about that last sentence for a long time. I hope you do as well. Read it all.

Justice does not come without cost. In the most obvious sense, it is the cost of life and safety. For very many here today, that will be the first thing in their minds and hearts ”“ along with the cost in anxiety and compassion that is carried by the families of servicemen and women. But there is another sort of cost involved in holding back the easy instinctive response and checking that you are genuinely doing something for the sake of long-term building or healing: a cost in putting up with boredom and frustration in the course of operations; in setting aside prejudice and resentment to get to know a strange culture and feel with and for its people. These are all part of the cost, the sacrifice, involved in seeking a better and more secure life for people who have suffered outrageously.

When we as Christians consider the sacrifice that purchased peace and mercy for the whole world, we think not only of the death of Jesus on the cross but also of the cost of love and openness to the stranger that marked his entire life. We can recognise the same thing at work in a lesser degree in any life that is dedicated to taking the world a little further out of barbarity and violence: it is not only the moments of high tragedy that matter, but the patient acceptance of daily frustrations and confusions, and the need for painstaking attention in every detail to the work that is there to be done. All of that too we commemorate and celebrate today.

Many people of my generation and younger grew up doubting whether we should ever see another straightforward international conflict, fought by a standing army with conventional weapons. We had begun to forget the realities of cost. And when such conflict appeared on the horizon, there were those among both policy makers and commentators who were able to talk about it without really measuring the price, the cost of justice. Perhaps we have learned something ”“ if only that there is ‘a time to keep silence’, a time to let go of the satisfyingly overblown language that is so tempting for human beings when war is in the air. But today it is also ‘a time to speak’, although only briefly, to speak our thanks for those who have taught us through their sacrifice the sheer worth of justice and peace and who have shouldered some of the responsibility for fleshing out the values most of us only talk about.

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It takes the masseuse, Mila from Kyrgyzstan, an hour to commute to work by bus on this sprawling American base. Her massage parlor is one of three on the base’s 6,300 acres, and sits next to a Subway sandwich shop in a trailer, surrounded by blast walls, sand and rock.

At the Subway, workers from India and Bangladesh make sandwiches for American soldiers looking for a taste of home. When the sandwich makers’ shifts end, the journey home takes them past a power plant, an ice-making plant, a sewage treatment center, a hospital and dozens of other facilities one would expect to find in a small city.

And in more than six years, that is what Americans have created here: cities in the sand.

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Iraqi military officials often refer to their American counterparts as “the friends,” a circumlocution full of Eastern subtlety that is often lost on the friends themselves. Add some more quotation marks, and it comes closer to the sense intended, “the ”˜friends.’ ” Not sarcastic, exactly, but rather colored with mixed emotions, as in the sentence, “The ”˜friends’ came by yesterday to complain again about payroll skimming.”

Americans find this hard to understand about the Iraq war, that their trillion-dollar enterprise in Iraq has made Iraqis and particularly the Iraqi military not only deeply dependent on America, but also deeply conflicted, even resentful about that dependency. After all, we saved them from defeat at the hands of a ruthless insurgency that a few years ago indeed could have destroyed them, and we spent 4,000 lives doing it, left probably 10 times that many young Americans crippled for life, and they’re not grateful?

That is not, at bottom, how the Iraqis see it. They are grateful, many of them, but gratitude is a drink with a bitter aftertaste. They also chafe at the thousands of daily humiliations they endure from a mostly well-meaning but often clueless American military. An Iraqi politician who wishes to remain nameless (“I have to deal with the friends,” he explains) tells of traveling with the Iraqi Army’s chief of staff, a general in uniform, epaulets bristling with eagles, stars and swords. They were at the Baghdad airport, about to get on one of the few Iraqi military planes, when an American sergeant stopped him and refused to allow him to board. Despite the general’s remonstrations of rank and privilege, the sergeant made sure the plane took off without him.

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The struggle for land, resources and control along a northern strip that has become known as the fault line is festering and threatening hopes of unity among Iraq’s disparate ethnic and religious factions.

“We have three governments up here: the central government, the Kurdish government and the Islamic State of Iraq government,” said an Iraqi soldier from Khazna who spoke on the condition of anonymity for fear of retribution. “We are lost in the middle.”

The central government is trying to push back an expansionist Kurdistan regional government; Sunni Arab leaders have old and new scores to settle with Kurdish leaders; and insurgents linked to Saddam Hussein’s ousted government and Al Qaeda want to foment conflict. All sides appear to be retrenching, shunning compromise or buying time as the withdrawal of American forces looms. Villages like Khazna and minorities like theShabaks who live on this fault line continue to pay the heaviest price.

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As a school of thought based on love, Sufism has influenced Catholic and Jewish mysticism and the transcendentalism of Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau. In the U.S., Sufi teachings have attracted a wide swath of followers. In the music video for Madonna’s 1994 song “Bedtime Story,” whirling dervishes dance to Madonna’s Sufi-inspired verse, “Let’s get unconscious.” To Stephen Schwartz, a convert to Sufism and the author of “The Other Islam: Sufism and the Road to Global Harmony,” the faith’s emphasis on achieving internal peace can fill the “great spiritual hunger in this country and in the West in general.”

“In Sufism, the focus is on fixing the self rather than fixing others. That concept is inherently pacific, not political,” says Hedieh Mirahmadi, a Sufi practitioner. Ms. Mirahmadi is the general counsel of Sheikh Muhammad Hisham Kabbani, the popular deputy master of the orthodox Naqshbandi order. In Sufism, many paths lead to God. Other orders include the aloof Nimatullahi, whose meeting house was described above, the progressive Bekstashi and the militant Qadiri.

The problem arises when the spiritual path to God is blocked with violence. Do Sufis, inherently peaceful, take up arms in the name of the very complicated and controversial notion of jihad, or holy war? Ms. Mirahmadi says no, emphatically. She and her Sufi master, Mr. Kabbani, condemn the behavior of the Naqshbandi Army in Iraq.

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Sergeant Blaylock went back to Houston, where he tried to pick up the pieces of his life and shape them into a whole. But grief and guilt trailed him, combining with other stresses: financial troubles, disputes with his estranged wife over their young daughter, the absence of the tight group of friends who had helped him make it through 12 months of war.

On Dec. 9, 2007, Sergeant Blaylock, heavily intoxicated, lifted a 9-millimeter handgun to his head during an argument with his girlfriend and pulled the trigger. He was 26.

“I have failed myself,” he wrote in a note found later in his car. “I have let those around me down.”

Over the next year, three more soldiers from the 1451st ”” Sgt. Jeffrey Wilson, Sgt. Roger Parker and Specialist Skip Brinkley ”” would take their own lives. The four suicides, in a unit of roughly 175 soldiers, make the company an extreme example of what experts see as an alarming trend in the years since the invasion of Iraq.

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Worth taking some time on. There are also other good sites linked at the bottom of the page.

You started out on Monday questioning why we were being so opposite of George Bush in all these questions. And on Friday I’m answering questions about why are we so much like George Bush on all these questions.

I’ll let you guys discern what period of day that all changed.

—Robert Gibbs, Barack Obama’s Press secretary, as quoted in this morning’s Globe and Mail

IRAQ is threatened by a new wave of sectarian violence as members of the “Sons of Iraq” ”“ the Sunni Awakening militias that were paid by the US to fight Al-Qaeda ”“ begin to rejoin the insurgency.

If the spike in violence continues, it could affect President Barack Obama’s pledge to withdraw all combat troops from Iraqi cities by the end of June. All US troops are due to leave the country by 2012.

A leading member of the Political Council of Iraqi Resistance, which represents six Sunni militant groups, said: “The resistance has now returned to the field and is intensifying its attacks against the enemy. The number of coalition forces killed is on the rise.”

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Even after six years on the ground, problems are beginning to build as American forces in Iraq move toward withdrawal over the next few years.

The question of who is going to rule after the Americans leave is up in the air and will not be resolved until U.S. forces have gone. Apart from the division of political power, there does not exist, for example, a law to govern oil revenue sharing. In the meantime, the American presence will be used by various Iraqi elements to try to improve their positions in advance of the withdrawal.

Since the resolution of the question will almost certainly be by force, preliminary maneuvering will also almost certainly involve force. At this point there is skirmishing, and the familiar weapons of car bombs and assassinations are appearing with greater frequency.

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Army Spc. Chris Hussey survived five bombings and a rocket attack while serving a yearlong tour in Iraq as a combat medic.

The Columbia soldier, who received two Purple Hearts, has waged a fierce fight to regain normalcy in his life.

Other than a 1-inch scar below his left eye, the 5-foot-10-inch Hussey, who keeps his blond hair cut short, military-style, did not suffer other visible wounds.

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Of the roughly 80 million members of the Anglican Church worldwide, the Rev. Andrew White reckons none of them would want his job.

Few would voluntarily risk death over six years of war in order to provide the spiritual and daily needs of Iraqi Christians. Who would live in Baghdad if they could get out at any time, with their wife and two children back home in England?

What would possess a man to cross the entryway into St. George’s Church on Haifa Street in downtown Baghdad a few years ago, at the height of the sectarian massacre, on a morning when bodies hung from the streetlights?

In the simplest terms, White said he had a calling.

Read it all and please take the time to look through the wonderful photos of Palm Sunday in Baghdad.

U.S. combat deaths in Iraq have flattened at the lowest level since the war began six years ago Thursday, and the Navy has not lost a member to combat in more than a year.

Three Marines have been killed in combat since August, and none since December, records show. The Air Force hasn’t had a combat death since April, and the Navy since February 2008.

In some weeks, casualty figures for Iraq show, the number of non-combat deaths for U.S. troops topped those killed in fighting.

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President Obama heads to one of the nation’s most storied military bases Friday morning to unveil plans to pull most troops out of Iraq by August 2010 and he has support from an unlikely quarter ”” Senator John McCain, the Republican he beat in last year’s election.

Mr. McCain and other Republicans emerged from a meeting with Mr. Obama at the White House on Thursday evening reassured that the president’s withdrawal plan is responsible and reasonable. After securing assurances from Mr. Obama that he would reconsider his plans if violence increases, Mr. McCain and the Republicans expressed cautious support.

The convergence of Mr. Obama and Mr. McCain on Iraq would have seemed highly improbable just a few months ago, when they clashed sharply on the future of the American mission there. Mr. McCain accused Mr. Obama of being naïve and opposed his withdrawal plans. At one point, Mr. McCain said Mr. Obama “would rather lose a war than lose a campaign.”

Aides to the president said Mr. Obama approved his withdrawal plan at a meeting with his national security team Wednesday and would tell an audience of several thousand Marines and their families at Camp Lejeune, N.C., on Friday that he is bringing the current phase of the war to a close in August 2010.

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MR. [DAVID] GREGORY: So what are the biggest challenges he faces now in Afghanistan?

MR. [TOM] RICKS: Well, I think the first thing is to recognize that it’s not really a war in Afghanistan, it’s a war in Afghanistan and Pakistan. As a friend of mine said, it’s hard to win a war in Afghanistan when the enemy wants to fight it in the next country over, Pakistan.

MR. GREGORY: Right. And that’s the Taliban fighting and winning battles in Pakistan. This is where we went to war to take them out of power.

MR. RICKS: And that’s very scary. And our supply lines through Pakistan are being challenged. Bridges are being blown up, American convoys are being attacked. So I think the first thing that Obama will do is begin to look at it as an Afghan-Pakistan war, in which Pakistan is really the more important factor. We could lose in Afghanistan. It would be unhappy, but not, you know, terrible for us. If you lose Pakistan, you end up having the mujahideen, Islamic extremists, with nuclear weapons. And that was a major al-Qaeda goal that we really do not want to see happen. I don’t think that Newsweek got it quite right the other day when they referred to Afghanistan as potentially Obama’s Vietnam. I think potentially Obama’s Vietnam is Pakistan.

Caught this on the way home from worship yesterday on satellite radio. Mr. Ricks’ new book sounds fascinating. Read it all.[/i]